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Notes -
There is a concept called punitive damages. WP:
Sometimes a defendant is liable for damages but did not commit an act of evil. If you crash a car into another car because a marten had chewed on some cables or conducts, resulting in your car behaving unexpectedly, that is just bad luck, and justice would be satisfied if you paid for the repair costs of the other car. If you damaged another car because you were participating in an illegal street race, that would be different, especially if you are rich enough that the repair bill would not hurt you.
If any other gang had kidnapped and held this guy for more than a month, they would be looking at long prison sentences, which would be sufficient to prevent a repetition at least in the short term and hopefully generally through setting the correct incentives. Cops enjoy wide-ranging immunities, so it is not feasible to prove malicious conduct to the point where we can just sentence them to lengthy prison sentences to set incentives.
Sometimes, the justice system will hold an innocent man in prison and he will be lucky if he gets an apology with his freedom. This can happen as a result of honest mistakes. "Given a professional investigation, we concluded at that time that you were very likely the killer, so we locked you up. Later evidence came in which exonerated you, but we could not have reasonably gotten that evidence any earlier. Sorry, shit happens." Good luck getting anything from the state in such cases. Societies reasonably does not want cops to not arrest killers out of fear they will need to pay compensation for arresting the wrong guy later.
But what happened to that guy should not have happened, ever. The police did not act in good faith, nor did the judge. There is no tradeoff for providing a huge negative incentive.
Per WP, Perry county has a population of about 9k, so the damages awarded would come to about 100$ per capita, which is hopefully enough that it will be felt by the electorate and push their gradient descent into electing less terrible officials, and generally provide a healthy incentive not to violate 1A rights.
(As an European, I think it is very silly to let a population of less than 10k have its own branch of the justice system. In Germany, an instance of an Amtsgericht (our lowest court, which would sign off on prison for being a danger to others) represents 130k people on average.)
And that it happened reveals a deep rot in the United States system. It is too easy for low-lifes to arrest, charge, and imprison good people. Part of that is that standards need to be raised for cops and it should be possible to earn rights against cops through demonstration of good character. Cops are really for harassing the bottom 10% of society, whereas a cop should be shaking in fear when addressing someone from the top 10% of society if they don't have a warrant of some kind in hand from a court run by those same people. Charges are too easy: most laws should be abolished. Leaving murder, assault, stealing, and similar laws. They exploited a shitty law to arrest this guy which criminalized speech without demonstration of harm being done. That's like a JS api in your browser that lets websites run shell commands on your system. The cops are the website and they super duper pinky promise to only run good commands. The design is so flawed that the consequences are obvious. Imprisonment: the United States is too punitive and the sentences are unjust in most cases. Emphasize criminal record in sentencing and make it almost impossible to imprison someone with a clean record who didn't commit a violent crime for more than one year. There are too many ways to go to prison for over a decade in the United States by harming nobody and having a clean criminal record. That's ripe for exploitation: imprisonment is normalized. And the excuse for this is mostly that Americans need to do something with the underclass. But none of this effectively deals with the underclass as could the system I describe which is not exploitable in the same way.
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